Attending preschool promotes math and reading and writing skills in toddlers, but their peers are catching up in kindergarten, according to study results.
Children who attend preschool enter kindergarten with greater abilities than those who do not. However, that benefit has almost halved by the end of the year as her counterparts are catching up quickly, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.
“It has been of great research and political interest to ensure that young children come to kindergarten ready to learn. In any case, pre-K programs helped achieve that goal, ”said Arya Ansari, PhD from Ohio State University and lead author of the study published in the journal Developmental psychology. “However, questions remained as to whether contemporary and expanded Pre-K programs would provide lasting benefits to children throughout their educational careers.”
The researchers looked at 2,581 children enrolled in kindergarten in a large, ethnically diverse county. All participants were from low-income families who would qualify for Head Start or some other subsidized preschool program. Just over half (1,334) attended a preschool program, the rest did not. Researchers rated the children for their academic skills (e.g., literacy and math), managerial functions (a set of mental skills that include working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control), and their socio-emotional skills, which were deemed important to academic success will. The assessments were carried out at the beginning of the kindergarten year and again in the spring.
“We found that pre-K graduates came into kindergarten and demonstrated stronger academic skills than those who did not attend preschool. The same was true for managerial roles, but there was no aggregate difference in the kindergarten teachers’ reports on their socio-emotional skills, ”said Ansari. “However, we also found that the differences between participants and non-participants decreased between fall and spring of kindergarten, mainly because non-participants who first started school in kindergarten compared to their classmates achieved greater learning gains with pre-K experiences. ”
These differences in progress during kindergarten were not consistently uniform, but, according to Ansari, differed according to qualifications. For example, in non-preschool children, about 80% of the difference in reading and writing skills scores was eliminated over the course of the school year, but only 55% of the difference in math skills and 45% of the difference was eliminated in vocabulary and general knowledge.
“It is important to emphasize that all children – regardless of participation before K – have improved their child and leadership skills in kindergarten. However, pre-K graduates made smaller improvements than their counterparts who did not attend Pre-K, ”said Ansari.
The research was only conducted with students from low-income families as other research shows they enter kindergarten academically at a disadvantage and, according to Ansari, significant public investments have been made to gain access to preschool programs to fill these gaps. Therefore, caution should be exercised when trying to extrapolate the results to higher-income families, he said.
“An interesting part of our findings was that children’s classroom experiences in kindergarten have little to do with whether the benefits of Pre-K persist over time,” he said. Instead, our findings seem to suggest that while children’s skills may be improved through pre-K, their longer-term outcomes are likely to be influenced by factors outside the framework of early school education. We must view pre-K as one of the many investments we make to ensure that all children have an equal opportunity to thrive in life. ”
He suggests that future research should focus on understanding why Pre-K graduates in kindergarten make less profit than their first-time peers. This research will require a more detailed and comprehensive study of the children’s experiences during the kindergarten year.
Reference: “Persistence and Convergence: The End of Kindergarten Outcomes of Pre-K Graduates and Their Unsupervised Peers” by Arya Ansari, PhD, Ohio State University, and Robert Pianta, PhD, Jessica Whittaker, PhD, Virginia Vitiello, PhD, and Erik Ruzek, PhD, University of Virginia. Developmental psychology, published online on October 5, 2020.
DOI: 10.1037 / dev0001115
